Health hazards

Thanks to TV's obsession with medical dramas, we're all
becoming that most dangerous of creatures, the armchair expert.
Brian Courtis reports.

There are probably more surgeons, doctors and nurses in
television drama today than GPs in the hallowed ranks of the
Australian Medical Association. And not all of them are twiddling
around with super forensic cyber-technology on mutilated bodies,
dabs of DNA, or nasty things that should stay out of the arms of
the law.

Narky, weird, even worryingly erratic ... we love to hear this
new young breed tell us what's wrong with us. No Dr Kildare bedside
manners here, thank you. Tell it like it is.

And indeed they do deliver their verdicts, worrying things about
poorly patients we can all look up on the net later. And what do
you know, these always seem to match something we have been
feeling. Absolute magic! Heavens to Tony Abbott, it's just one step
from self-diagnosis, that wonderful dream of health ministers
around the world.

We fossick through nuggets of TV medical wisdom as if for gold.
Do they have something nasty for us? Sure do. Tried this loathsome
prostate? Galloping Saharan toe rot? Or perhaps our speckled acne,
common only to those who dine on hospital sparrow droppings? How
about hippopotamuses' hernial cramps? Well, maybe it just has to be
that old favourite, Brighton Beach shingles?

Medical drama is the hypochondriac's paradise. The joy of
watching House, All Saints or Grey's Anatomy is
in discovering you have at least one or two of their diseases of
the week.

Or in catching the feisty Dr Charlotte Beaumont deliver an
uppercut to a cocky young nurse who gets in her way. And who among
us remains unstirred by Dr Frank Campion's bark as bikies play
medical consultant while roaring through the wards of All
Saints' Western General?

Who could forget George Clooney's cries for a chem-seven or an
IV-push as gurneys bashed their way through drunken sporting jocks
and the gangland wounded to be among the blood-spattered nurses and
interns within the gates of his ER?

The real-life doctors I remember were not like those on
television. They were not unscrubbed, angry, rebellious, overworked
and exhausted punks ready to abandon planning and protocol at a
second's notice, prepared to go for gut instinct rather than
careful thought and triple-checking. They were reliable,
conservative, calming and thorough. Trouble is, that sort of
practice doesn't make for particularly interesting television.
Marcus Welby MD is not a lot of fun.

Ever since M*A*S*H we've had a taste for doctors who
break the rules. It's an ends-justify-the-means sort of philosophy;
we're happy to accept the lesser of two nonsenses. Particularly if
a starchy hierarchical authority cops it along the way.

We love to see our TV fictional doctors in full flight,
screaming the medical equivalent of "stop the presses" as they rush
into the operating theatre at the last moment, unscrubbed,
unexpected and unwanted. We love to see them shepherd out any
cardio-thoracic or neuro surgeon who resists them, diving into
someone's most sensitive parts and, with a karate twirl of the
scalpel, save yet another gobsmacked patient from an excruciating
screen exit.

Amazing how they do all this without political inquiries, royal
commissions, or even a "just a minute" query from their colleagues
and nurses. Amazing how frequently their risky zeal and
unprofessional behaviour is rewarded.

Most of these shows do, of course, have medical advisers, though
it's not difficult to conclude that, to a stubborn director, the
medical facts or possibilities shouldn't spoil a good
storyline.

When the surgeons are about to operate without masks so that you
know who the prettiest heroes are, you know the patient doesn't
really matter. When a school of doctors discuss their theories in
the foreground as a patient happily slips away without even a nurse
nearby in the background, a writer is busy treating his
exposition.

And don't think doctors and nurses don't enjoy picking up the
various code blues in TV's carbolic soaps. Like Hugh Laurie's
cantankerous, anti-social, drug-addicted character Gregory House
MD, who is hooked on General Hospital, they watch and pick up all
the nonsenses, but still return to pick up procedural flaws,
absolute piffle in treatment, and the short-cuts to recovery that
match those instant-DNA bobbydazzlers on which police cold-case
dramas so rely.

They probably also notice a parallel rise in happy
hypochondriacs in their waiting rooms, as well as worried patients
wondering whether to expect what they've just seen on MDA
or All Saints. There are hospital diseases and cures
aplenty out there in tellyland.

There are special treats for those of us at the frontline,
previewing medical shows. It was interesting recently, for example,
to taste the joys of the real-life MRI, as one does, around the
time a political ratbag in MDA was revealed as a banished
radiologist who had once managed through his utter incompetence to
cause irreparable damage to some poor kid who was having a seizure
inside the magnificent machine. No matter that it was fiction, it
did nothing for the nerves.

That was in the series in which Lisa McCune was a young doctor
running an outer-suburban emergency ward in a hospital short of
surgeons and state funds. Paul Bishop played her colleague, an
unfortunate who allowed one patient to die of malaria and another
to wait so long she drifted away in a hospital toilet cubicle.

Network Ten, which brought us the scary investigatory show
Medical Investigation as well as House MD, is about to get
its own new medical drama series, The Surgeon, starring
Justine Clarke as hot-shot Eve Agius, described in the early word
from Sydney as (pardon me while I yawn with just a cynical hint of
sleeping sickness) a highly skilled woman in a mostly male
world.

But while we wait there is much medical mayhem to be
appreciated. After Save Me, this week's episode of Seven's
hit series Grey's Anatomy, for instance, expect a
kerfuffle about the flaws of a sub-plot based on the refusal of a
young Orthodox Jew to accept a porcine heart valve and risk her
life. It certainly created quite a stir in New York.

Then again, Grey's Anatomy is never to be taken too
seriously. This one thrives on sex-mad surgeons who rush into
surgery with boozy anaesthetists on a whim. Their Seattle hospital
is the kind of futuristic technology-equipped place I'm sure our
own health ministers really believe we have here. No wonky lifts,
overcrowded emergency rooms or shortage of scanners. Research on
tap. A designer's dream. A hypochondriac's paradise.